SEO Secret Ingredient - Part 1

I am a little reluctant to claim I originated this practice, but to date, I've never heard anyone else describe it, I've never read about it, and it usually takes me 20 minutes to describe it to other SEO professionals before it makes sense... however, to my backwards/sideways mind, it makes perfect sense and I'm surprised I don't see more evidence of it around.

The blog you're reading is called Metric HooDoo and is the playground area for me with respect to information that I might not want to put on my main PPC/SEO site, MetricVooDoo... and yes, if I think I can come up with enough jibberish to populate it, I might very well create another free blog on blogs2k.com or wordpress.org called Metric DooDoo. Don't think I haven't thought about it.

But this isn't an exercise in variations on a theme, although that's kinda fun too... it's an exercise in spreading the word - your word - putting what you have to say in more than one place and then letting those places talk to each other. In fact, it's almost a certainty that I will set up at least two more free blogs with names all their own (not related to Metric or Voodoo) because I usually have so many opinions on things, I can populate half a dozen blogs rather easily.

Google Really Is Your Friend
You might have noticed that over there in the sidebar, there's a section that says "MetricVoodoo, All Around..." and it lists 5 Article titles. That's the RSS feed from my main site. After that site had been up a month or so, I came over here to my Google friend, Blogger/Blogspot and set up another, less serious blog, knowing full well that there's a gadget in here called RSS Feed. This gadget, when populated with the RSS URL of another blog, will pull the headlines and excerpts into the Blobspot blog.

A quick check using the FireFox plugin called NoDoFollow tells me that the links on my Blogspot blog are all followable, so those links count as external links back to my main site. For good measure, I'll also sprinkle links throughout various articles that go back to where I answer questions or talk more deeply about ideas that I might start here, or vice-sersa, to spread the linkage around a little. I need to check the settings on my Blogspot blog and make sure that I've given permission for the Search Engine to index my blog and detect not only the articles I put in here, at which time it may also follow the outbound links...

Does that make anyone go "hmmm" yet?

One of the by-products of creating the Google ID necessary to get my Blogspot blog is that now I can use that ID to also set up Google Reader. I can add the RSS feed of my main site into Google Reader then mark some of the individual articles as Shared... we'll come back to this later, but you need to get acquainted with the sharing features of any blog readers you use. I'm using Google as the first example because it's simple to figure out and it's also included in some other tools, like FriendFeed, which we'll explore later.

So, at this point I have these things in operation:

• the main web site/blog where most of my substantiative articles go
• a secondary blog on Blogspot (a Google property) that I have pre-determined will be for things that are valid, but not quite ready for prime time, which is posting links via RSS feed back to my main site for 5 instant external links
  
• a blog reader with a handful of shared articles

Yahoo also offers free email addresses, and through Yahoo360, a free blog. Do you have some social network profiles? Take a look at some of those - do you see "blog" as a menu option? Most blog apps include some kind of RSS feed-nabber widget thingy so that you can always have something new on your page, courtesy of other people's blogs, even when you don't update yours often. You can also generally add as many instances of the RSS widget as you want so that you can pull in headline feeds from more than one blog at a time if you want.

You don't want to overdo the blog accounts - you don't want to end up with more than you can feasibly handle because that will divert your focus - it's better to populate two or three blogs with good solid writing than populate 12 blogs with inane or redundant comments (and Adsense Blocks) that are not likely to be naturally linked back to by anyone because they're lame.

A lot of bloggers can't decide "who" they want to be on their blog - it's more fun to write one way, but more profitable to write another, and what if I want to stick up some video content? Do I want all that stuff cluttering up the bread-n-butter site? It's useful but will it trash up the neighborhood? And maybe it would be nice to have a place to rant once in a while... These are all indications that you have what it takes with your writing to be able to feed at least two blogs, maybe three. If so, this might be a viable tactic for you to try. Just make sure your blogs contain valid non-duplicate content, and don't break anything of the SEO Commandments.

Stay tuned for part II

{Editor's note: Need advice on where to find the easiest blogging platforms to get started on? Yep, that's on my other blog.}